We are excited to announce C3 – the next generation of Amazon EC2 Compute Optimized instances. The C3 instance type is available in five sizes: c3.large, c3.xlarge, c3.2xlarge, c3.4xlarge and c3.8xlarge with 2, 4, 8, 16 and 32 vCPUs respectively. C3 instances will provide you with the highest performance processors and the lowest price/compute performance compared to all other Amazon EC2 instances. C3 instances also feature Enhanced Networking and SSD-based instance storage.

We recommend using C3 instances for CPU-bound, scale out applications and compute-intensive HPC applications. Customers running high traffic front-end fleets, batch processing, distributed analytics or cluster computing applications will benefit from the high processor and network performance of these instances.

You can purchase C3 instances as On-Demand instances, Reserved instances, or Spot instances. C3 instances are initially available in in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), EU (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and Asia Pacific (Sydney) regions.